In Oakland County, unidentified bodies rare

PONTIAC >> At the Oakland County Medical Examiner’s office in suburban Detroit, about 1,100 autopsies are performed annually. Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Ljubisa Dragovic and Administrator Robert Gerds can recall only one unidentified body in the last 15 years, an unknown woman whose case dates to 1999.

“’Badly decomposed’ is a relative term,” Dragovic said. “Number one, teeth do not decay as a result of decomposition.”

If teeth aren’t available or there is nothing to compare them to, other means of identification must be tried. Ancillary information about an unidentified body is important, Dragovic said.

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“You cannot identify someone by analyzing their DNA without being able to compare it with a suspected next of kin or closest relative you can come across.”

Dragovic does deal with prehistoric remains that can’t be identified, including Native American remains from as long as 1,000 to 1,500 years ago. “You do not have practical means or ways to identify that person very specifically,” he said.

Unlike national databases for fingerprints and DNA, Gerds said no such system exists for dental records. If they’re available, dental records are one of the first methods investigators turn to when the identity of a body isn’t known.

“There is no dental database per se,” said Gerds, who worked as an inspector in charge of major crimes at the Detroit Police Department before coming to the Oakland County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Gers said problems with a possible national dental records database include privacy and funding, as well as the fact that dental records would come from private dentists, while fingerprint and DNA records are maintained by the government.

“Now you’re asking the private sector to contribute to the public sector,” he said. “Who’s going to create this wheel, and who’s going to pay for it? Yes, it’s doable.”

DNA is “another tool in the toolkit,” but is used “almost as a last resort” for identification, Gerds said. Requests for DNA comparisons made to the state or FBI can take as long as a year.

Requests tied to known criminal cases are prioritized, but DNA samples from cases where investigators don’t yet know if the cause of death was criminal aren’t processed as quickly, Gerds said.

Dragovic, who’s nationally recognized in his field and is frequently called as an expert witness, performed autopsies on most of those who committed assisted suicide with physician Jack Kevorkian.

“Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a perfect crime, only an imperfect investigation.”